Commercial television and radio broadcasts are typically funded by advertisers who assume that the program content being broadcast will attract a certain number of viewers or listeners, who will then continue watching or listening as the advertisers' commercials are broadcast. This model has clear weaknesses, since there is no assurance that the audience are actually paying attention to the commercials. Large portions of the audience may have been mis-targeted and have no reason to buy the product being advertised. Additionally, they may not appreciate the implicit social contract of commercial-based broadcast, and resent commercials as an intrusion into their viewing/listening experience. However, this model has worked well enough to provide profits for broadcasters and advertisers, and as long as no means of improving upon it was available, it has persisted.
As video and audio streams in television switch to digital encoding, the home television setup will include a Set-Top Box (STB), which is a type of special-purpose computer designed to convert a digital data stream into the audio and video signals that make up a TV broadcast. It is also possible to install an adapter card in a computer to cause it to act as an STB. These data streams may also include data to be used by computer, or STB, applications. The computer or STB may also include a storage device, such as a disk, on which content can be recorded for later presentation.
As a result of this use of such a digital data stream and a computer or STB to process it, the traditional advertising-based TV model faces certain problems and opportunities. Among the problems are technology that makes it easy to automate the deletion of commercials from the media during presentation. Among the opportunities are the interactive capabilities of computers and STB's, which enable broadcasters and advertisers to target their advertising more efficiently. Another significant capability that generally accompanies digital TV systems is the capability for the receiving computer or STB to communicate with the content provider, either through a hardware backchannel (as in a cable system) or through the Internet.
A need has thus been recognized in conjunction with responding to the aforementioned opportunities.